


Another Life

by InColor



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies)
Genre: Age Difference, Canon Compliant, Future Fic, Hand Jobs, M/M, Older Man/Younger Man, Recreational Drug Use, Resurrection, Tony Stark Needs a Hug, peter is 20, the only drug use is one scene with weed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-05
Updated: 2019-12-05
Packaged: 2021-02-26 03:08:02
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,320
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21676522
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/InColor/pseuds/InColor
Summary: Tony comes back to a world where everyone's moved on without him.Peter helps.
Relationships: Peter Parker/Tony Stark
Comments: 30
Kudos: 384
Collections: Spider-Man Public Identity Reveal





	Another Life

**Author's Note:**

> Peter is 20 years old in this. If this relationship still isn't your cup of tea, feel free to not continue reading.
> 
> There's not really explicit mental health talk in this, but Tony does have some symptoms of depression and he's really not good at seeking help. Please take care of yourselves better than he does, friends.

His daughter cries when she sees him.

They’re frightened tears, not happy ones. Morgan clings to the leg of her mother’s pantsuit like a toddler instead of a girl about to turn eight, burying her face against Pepper’s thigh. She’s grown up so much since Tony last saw her, taller by several inches. If he’d walked past her on the street, he might not have recognized her at all, might not have realized that she was the little girl he’d left behind. His stomach turns at the idea.

“I think she needs some time,” Pepper tells Tony, placing a comforting hand in Morgan’s hair, her smile strained. She’s almost the woman he knew, but the details are wrong. There are a few more lines on her face now, and her hair is different, shorter. She doesn’t wear a ring.

Tony, a man frozen in time, looks the same as when he’d died. He feels out of place, visibly mismatched. One of these things is not like the others.

“Of course,” Tony says. He’s reclined in a hospital bed, looking more like a dying man than a newly living one. Pepper and Morgan stand back from him, barely inside the door.

He tries to smile, too, but his attempt isn’t any better than Pepper’s. They’re following a script, but they don’t believe the lines.

He watches Pepper usher Morgan away from him, disappearing out the door and down the hall. He feels empty, like he’s a shell of Tony Stark, a greyscale photocopy of the man who had been a husband and a father. He remembers the day he and Pepper were married, the day Morgan was born, but it all feels like it happened to someone else.

He can’t blame them. He’d walk away, too.

***

There’s a whole team of doctors assigned to Tony, all of whom buzz around him excitedly when he doesn’t protest at their pricking and poking. He feels too tired to fight, like he just woke up from a long nap and can’t quite shake the sleepiness.

There’s a light in the doctors’ eyes, probably imagining the potential for discovery. What scientist wouldn’t want a chance to prod at the world’s first resurrected man? It’s what dreams are made of, or at least award-winning research.

The light slowly dims when test after test comes back unremarkable. Tony isn’t going to be the starring subject in their medical journals, because there’s nothing to write about after all.

 _Tony Stark back from the dead, blood pressure normal_. It’s not a great headline.

Medically speaking, he’s a reasonably healthy middle-aged man, not even a scar left from the snap that had obliterated Thanos’ forces. Dying and then rising from the grave three years later would have been an excellent party trick a decade ago, before half the universe beat him to the punchline. There’s an air of disappointment; he isn’t interesting anymore.

Peter sits in a vinyl chair in the corner of the room through the barrage of tests, straight-backed and attentive. He’s barely left Tony leave his sight since that morning, only excusing himself to get some coffee when Pepper and Morgan had arrived.

Just this morning, Tony woke up to Peter and Dr. Strange staring at him like he was – well, a ghost. Peter had hugged him, talking the whole time about _the ritual_ and how _it’s so amazing that it worked, Mr. Stark_. Peter’s been handling things ever since, calling Happy to drive them and Pepper to come up right away and probably other people too, all while Tony was still in a state of shock.

“Do you have a room here, kid?” Tony asks him that night, after the stream of doctors has slowed. Tony’s reclining on the hospital bed they’d insisted he use, even if he’d drawn the line at a gown. Fortunately, someone had produced jeans and a t-shirt that reads _2+2=5 for extremely large values of 2_ , so he assumes it’s one of Peter’s. (He and Peter fitting into the same t-shirt size is another thing he must have missed.)

They’re in the Avengers compound, or at least a building that’s where the compound used to be. It’s been rebuilt from the ground up, and none of it’s familiar to him anymore. Kind of like the rest of this world.

“You should get some sleep,” Tony continues.

“It’s only seven thirty, Mr. Stark,” Peter replies. That can’t be right; he’s been in this room for ages. There’s no clock on the wall, not even a window in the room to judge the passage of time. It’s like being in a both a hospital room and a bunker, and Tony isn’t fond of either location.

“Seriously? What time did you do the – “ Tony waves his hands in a vaguely magical way, “ – abracadabra or whatever?”

“Uh, maybe four?” Peter runs a hand through his hair, which is already messy from all the other times he’s run a hand through it. There are dark circles around his eyes, the kind that come from running on adrenaline for too long. Tony’s quite familiar with those.

“In the morning?” Tony asks, eyebrows raised. “Jesus. I’m gonna crash any second here anyway, so you might as well go rest.”

Peter watches him intensely, like Tony could disappear if he blinks, then he nods.

“I’ll let you sleep,” Peter says, standing and stretching his arms above his head. He hesitates only for a moment before walking up to Tony’s bed and coming in for the hug, although the positioning’s a little awkward while Tony’s laying reclined like this.

Tony pats Peter on the back a few times, the warmth of contact giving him a small amount of comfort. Then Peter withdraws, looking a little like he’s about to cry. Fortunately, though, the kid just turns around to head for the door. That’s a bit of a relief; Tony doesn’t even know where to start with his own emotions right now, let alone other people’s.

“Hey, kid?” Tony calls out as Peter’s about to walk out the door. Peter turns back, and it strikes Tony just how much older he looks. He’s broadened in the shoulders, filling out his t-shirt, and he carries himself with a confidence that Tony doesn’t remember him having. He’s not a kid anymore, even though Tony isn’t about to stop calling him that.

What did he go through, these past few years? What hasn’t Tony been there to protect him from?

“Bringing me back from the dead means we’re on a first-name basis now,” Tony says. “Those are the rules of magic resurrection spells. You’ll just have to get used to it.”

Peter’s smile brightens his whole face.

“I’m glad you’re back, Tony.”

At least one person feels that way.

***

The compound has a therapist now, one who works on-call like the team of doctors. He goes without complaint, not feeling the energy for a fight.

Her office tries way too hard to be homey, with perfectly arranged throw pillows on the sofa and cliched motivational posters on the walls. She talks to him about the Blip – that’s what they call it now, that five-year period where half the universe was dead. Tony hates the term immediately, hates the way it turns the unexaggerated greatest disaster of all time into something small, a momentary glitch in the system.

“People missed so much in those five years,” she tells him, earnestly leaning forward in her desk chair. “Their jobs were gone, their homes. Their children had grown up without them.” The _just like you_ stays unspoken. She hands him a paperback book – _Blipped: How to Seize Your Second Chance at Life_. The title takes up the whole cover in the way that self-help books do, the word _Blipped_ dissolving at the end like it’s mimicking turning to dust.

He remembers being on Titan, watching his teammates turn into _actual_ dust, trying to hold onto Peter as he dissolved into nothing, and feels sick. There’s no way in hell he’s reading this, but he says thank you and takes it anyway.

He’s still holding it in one hand when he walks by Sam on the way back to his room.

“I like that one,” Sam says, stopping in the hallway to gesture at the book. “Guess what happened to you isn’t that different than what happened to the rest of us.” It’s an olive branch, an attempt to let Tony be just another member of the team. Sam seems to be the de facto leader, and he’s better at it than Tony ever was. They’ve got a good thing going here, for everything Tony’s seen in the past couple of days. He’s just not sure he wants to be a part of it.

“Yeah, guess not,” Tony says. He doesn’t stop to chat, keeps walking back to his assigned room instead.

The bedroom is mostly empty, eggshell walls and grey sheets, just the essentials. There’s a small attached bathroom, but it isn’t much. He’d slept here last night, but it still looks untouched, smells like the only reason anyone has ever been in here was to clean up the gathering dust. He’s supposed to personalize it, probably. It reminds him of his room at MIT and how he’d covered the walls in posters. He doesn’t see the point here.

He puts the book on his nightstand only because throwing a book away feels somehow wrong, and then spends an hour or two sitting on the perfectly made bed, poking around on the tablet that’s been left for him. He needs to play catch-up on world events since he doesn’t even know who the president is now. This must be how Steve felt when he’d come off the ice, or at least a fraction of that feeling. They’ll never get to commiserate about it, though, since the bastard managed to die of old age in the last three years.

The knock on his door is a welcome distraction. It’s Peter, standing in the hallway wearing the Spider-Man suit, mask in hand, like he’d come straight in after finishing his patrolling. Maybe he had.

“You’ve made some changes,” Tony says, gesturing to the suit. The tweaks look small, little differences in composition of the fabric that a layperson probably wouldn’t even notice, but Tony sees them. He’d spent so many hours of his life on that suit, so of course he does.

“What? Oh, yeah,” Peter says, glancing down. “It’s really neat, actually! This one’s composed of auxetic nanofibers, so the material – “

“Gets stronger when you take a hit?” Tony raises his eyebrows. It’s a good idea, and he’s impressed that Peter seems to have nailed the execution. “Wait, so how did – “

“I can show you,” Peter says, gesturing over his shoulder. “I was actually here to see if you wanted to come to the lab with me, Mr. – Tony.”

“There’s a lab here?” His lab had always been a sanctuary. When all else failed him, he still had his machines.

Peter grins.

***

Karen is the reigning AI in the compound’s lab. Peter is the one down here the most, with Bruce off on a book-signing tour and none of the new Avengers recruits having scientific bent, and it seems he’s made the place his. It’s remarkable how similar it is to Tony’s own lab designs, and he wonders how much of that was intentional.

It’s nice having an AI in at least part of the building; the first time Tony called out for FRIDAY with no answer, he’d felt sick to his stomach. Just one more reminder that he doesn’t belong in this place. In the lab, though, under the blue-tinted lights and surrounded by specialized equipment, he can start to make himself at home.

“Give us some music, Karen,” Tony asks while Peter pulls up suit schematics on a holoscreen. Something peppy and terrible starts to play over the speakers, and Tony winces exaggeratedly.

“No no no, turn it off! Is that a _boy band_? What have you become in my absence, Pete?”

Peter laughs and doesn’t have the decency to look embarrassed. “Try the Mr. Stark playlist, Karen,” he says, and an AC/DC track starts up instead. Something in Tony’s stomach twists in knots at that, the _Mr. Stark playlist_ , but he tries to let it go, doesn’t examine it too closely.

They sit close to the projected screen, lab chairs clustered together, and chat while they look over the changes Peter’s made to the suit over the last few years. Tony makes some suggestions, asks questions about Peter’s processes and how he solved certain problems. Peter starts talking about his classes at Columbia, mostly in biomechanical engineering, the things he finds fascinating and what’s boringly easy.

“Columbia, huh?” Tony asks. It wasn’t his choice of school, but it wasn’t a bad one, either. Peter’s absolutely brilliant, could have gone anywhere in the world.

“MIT was my safety school,” Peter says with a little smirk, leaning back in his chair. Tony smiles. “Seriously, though, I didn’t want to leave New York. Aunt May, she’s got Happy now, but we were all each other had for so long. And the city’s home, you know? I didn’t think it would feel right being the friendly Boston Spider-Man.”

Tony nods, then pauses. “Wait, _what_ about May and Happy?”

Peter wrinkles his nose. “Don’t make me talk about it, please.”

They work well side by side, falling into a rhythm like they’ve been doing this for years. Tony can start a question and Peter will already know what he’s going to ask, and it doesn’t take much to get the kid going off on a rambling scientific tangent. Peter speaks his language, which is refreshing. It’s the closest thing to normalcy Tony’s had since he woke up.

“You’ve never told me how you got me back,” Tony mentions after a long, comfortable silence. He knows that Strange and Peter had done something, but they haven’t talked much about what. Peter’s shoulders tense and he runs a hand through his hair. That’s not a good sign.

“Yeah, um,” Peter says, uncomfortable. “It was just a ritual, you know? No big deal.”

“Peter.”

“There was this guy,” Peter says in a rush, giving in. “He was going to put his chemicals in the water, basically bioterrorism, make everyone really sick. I stopped him, but he kept talking about his wife and how he was going to bring her back. He had this thing on him when I – when I stopped him. Dr. Strange calls it an amulet, but honestly it was more like a really shiny rock.”

“A shiny rock,” Tony repeats, incredulous.

“So I told Dr. Strange he could keep it if he helped me use it first,” Peter continues, shrugging in a way that’s incongruous with how serious the story is. “It wasn’t actually that hard.”

The meaning of his words is heavy. Peter had been given the power of life and he used it to bring Tony back. _What about your parents?_ _What about your uncle?_ Tony helped save the world, sure, but it was already done. He’d lived his life, his family had moved on, his friends had moved on, but Peter Parker got to give someone a second chance and he’d chosen Tony.

 _Why me_ , he could ask, but the question feels too raw, like poking an open wound. _It shouldn’t have been me._

“Jesus, kid,” Tony says instead.

“Have I shown you the problem with the auto-fit?” Peter deflects. Tony recognizes the awkward redirect, since he’s done it so many times himself. He’d like to think he’s better at it, though. “It’s been kinda weird lately, like it’s looser than it used to be?”

Tony lets him pull the conversation in a new direction, just nods and says “Let’s take a look.”

***

Pepper comes by again, this time alone. They stand a few feet apart in Tony’s standard-issue Avenger bedroom, stock-still, eyes averted. He can’t remember things between them ever being this uncomfortable, not for all the fights they’ve had over the years. For one absurd moment he notices Pepper’s shoes and wonders if they’re ones she’s had all this time or if they’re new. He never was good at noticing the details like that.

“I think she’ll be ready to try again, soon,” Pepper says, meeting his eyes. “She wants to.”

“I’d like that,” Tony says. Morgan doesn’t quite feel like the daughter he left behind, like the little girl he remembers being so important to him, but he hopes that will change. It has to, he’ll make sure of it.

“I’m sorry that this is so – “ She pauses, looking away. “I’m still trying to believe it. It doesn’t feel real.”

He’d been so caught up in his own problems that he’d barely thought of what she must be going through. Pepper always puts on a good face, never lets them see her flinch. She’s protecting herself, not to mention their daughter.

“I’m seeing someone,” she says swiftly, like she’d practiced the words. Tony hadn’t known, but he’d wondered. Suspected. “He’s a good man. I just – I want to be clear about expectations. I want you in Morgan’s life, in my life. I mean that.”

It won’t be the same, she’s telling him, but he already knew that. Nothing here is the same. Tony isn’t the same person, and he doesn’t expect her to be.

“Does Morgan like him?” Tony asks. It seems like the most important question.

Pepper starts to tear up, but her voice is steady. “Yeah,” she says. “Morgan likes him. But he’ll never be her dad, Tony.”

Tony’s happy for them and nostalgic for the moments he’d missed all at the same time. It could have been different, if he’d been here, but he hadn’t been. “Good,” he says, because he doesn’t know what else to say. “That’s good.”

There’s another beat of silence.

“Do we actually need a divorce?” Tony asks. “I mean, we did the whole ‘til death’ thing. It seems redundant to sign the paperwork.”

Pepper laughs, wiping one-handed at the tears slipping down her face. She takes a step forward and hugs him, the first time they’ve touched since he woke up. She smells the same, hasn’t changed her brand of shampoo.

She leaves a small pile of documents on the table when she goes – they do need that divorce, apparently, but it isn’t like either of them will be fighting for assets – along with his last variant of arc reactor, the one that houses the nanotech Iron Man suit. He doesn’t ask where it’s been all this time. Maybe she kept it in a forgotten box in the garage, or on a shelf next to a framed photo of Tony. Hell, maybe she donated the damn thing to the Smithsonian. He doesn’t want to know.

***

Tony looks for a place in the city, since the constant buzz of New York is one thing that can’t have changed. Sam tells him he’s welcome back anytime. Tony thanks him and doesn’t say that he hates the new compound just for being new, that he feels like a dusty relic around all the baby-faced recruits whose names he can’t remember. He’ll probably visit, but it can’t ever be home.

Stark Tower doesn’t belong to the company anymore, but it isn’t too hard to find a space that will accommodate his needs. Resources are still a non-issue, so when he finds a space he likes, he buys the whole building. It seems like the simplest way to go.

It isn’t far from Pepper’s place in the city, so Morgan will be able to visit when she’s ready. They’ve talked on the phone a few times now, and the three of them are having lunch this weekend. It’s close to Columbia, too, so Peter can come by and use the lab whenever he wants. He’s promised that he will.

Pepper sends him FRIDAY. The hardware fills a moving truck, all of it dusty. She clearly hasn’t been maintained since he left. He doesn’t know whether to feel pleased that no one else has been fucking up his projects or indignant on FRIDAY’s behalf, so he settles on a bit of both.

He has the movers take her up to the top floor, where he plans to set up a living space. It’s an all-day project getting her set up again by himself, wiring speakers into the walls and altering bits of code as necessary. He doesn’t have furniture, not yet, but he can have this. Home is where the artificial intelligence is, as they say.

“How ya doing, FRIDAY?” he asks after hours of tinkering, mentally crossing his fingers.

“It’s good to see you again, boss,” she says pleasantly. Her voice is exactly like he remembers.

For the first time since waking up, Tony cries. It starts slow, a trickle, but quickly he’s sinking to the floor and his body is shaking with everything he’s been holding in. He leans back against the wall, taking in deep, hiccupy breaths.

Everything since he’s gotten back has been a little distorted, a photo taken with a fisheye lens. His little girl was older, his wife was with someone else, and none of them knew how to be in a room together. The Avengers were a bunch of kids training in a compound he’d never seen before. He was living in a building that was like Stark Tower without actually _being_ Stark Tower, because someone else had bought it and taken his name off the side. Even Peter, who’d welcomed him back with open arms and enthusiasm, had transformed from an impetuous kid into an impetuous young adult.

So many people he hadn’t been there for. He’d missed so much, but at least he didn’t have to miss FRIDAY. She’d never change on him.

“Would you like me to call for assistance?” FRIDAY asks, as concerned as an AI can sound.

Tony shakes his head. Deep breath in, deep breath out. He starts to feel the post-breakdown catharsis, the feeling of finally letting his emotions go and then being left with only the calm.

“I’ll be okay, FRI.”

He isn’t sure that’s true, but it could be.

***

“Do people usually come back from the dead – messed up?” Tony asks, waving his hands to illustrate his point. “Because I definitely feel like something got messed up.”

“Good evening to you too, Stark,” Dr. Strange greets him, sarcastic tone belying his polite words. He’s answered the door in his full robe and cape getup, even though it’s well past a polite hour for Tony to come knocking. Tony wonders if the guy sleeps like that. “Do come in, of course.”

Suddenly they’re inside the sanctum – is that the right word for wizard house? – and Tony’s sitting in an uncomfortable, high-backed chair, cup of tea steaming in a saucer on a table next to him. They’re surrounded by bookshelves, and the room smells like an old library, full of paper and dust.

“I had wondered when you’d be coming by.” Strange is sitting across from him, leaning back with his fingers steepled. He looks pretentious. “I’m afraid I don’t have a point of comparison for other reanimations. It’s not a subject that I have personal experience with.” Tony winces at that word, _reanimation_. Like he’s Frankenstein’s monster.

“Coming back from the dead is not unprecedented, of course, but it is extremely uncommon,” Strange continues. “The majority of the literature on the subject regards unsuccessful resurrection rituals, not successful ones.”

“Unsuccessful,” Tony repeats. It hadn’t occurred to him, but it’s possible. A botched ritual, Strange or Peter missing a syllable of Latin, and suddenly most of Tony is back instead of all of him.

“The ones that didn’t work correctly, yes.” Strange pauses to sip tea. Tony suspects the man gets off on being deliberately obtuse.

“I know what unsuccessful means,” Tony snaps. “Is it possible that _this_ ritual was unsuccessful?”

“No.”

“That’s it?” Tony exclaims, gesturing widely with his hands. “No?”

“It isn’t possible that we failed,” Strange says, his tone slow and condescending, “because you are here. Alive.”

“Okay, but what if I’m not?” Tony asks, and he realizes how stupid that sounds even while he’s saying it. He waves his hand like he can erase what he just said from the air, start over. “I mean – how do you know you got Tony Stark back, and not some made-in-China knockoff?”

He’s never given voice to it before, this fear that’s made a home in the back of his mind since he woke up. Now Strange is looking at him like it’s something pitiable, which is why Tony has kept quiet about his doubts. He doesn’t want anyone’s sympathy. He wants _answers_ , the concrete knowledge of who he is.

“Biologically speaking, you are Tony Stark,” Strange replies. Tony had expected hearing scientific confirmation from Strange would be reassuring, but it isn’t. The tightness in his stomach, the uncertainty, is still there.

“If you’d like a philosophical answer as to whether you inhabit the same consciousness as the Tony Stark who died on the battlefield, I’m afraid I can only pose another question.” Strange leans forward, all dramatic posture and timing. “Does it matter?”

Tony came here for answers, not this pseudo theatrical nonsense. If he wanted to talk about his feelings, it wouldn’t be with Strange. He nods, dismissive, and stands. “Good talk, Gandalf,” he says. Strange rolls his eyes.

“Have your existential crisis during business hours next time,” Strange snarks, then he snaps his fingers and Tony is back out on the chilly New York sidewalk in front of the sanctum, staring at its closed front door.

What an asshole.

***

Tony starts putting his life together. It isn’t his old life, but it’s the one he’s got.

He has that lunch with Pepper and Morgan, and when Morgan cries it isn’t because she’s afraid. She calls him daddy and they hug for a long time, and she asks when they’ll see each other again. They schedule another lunch for next week, and when she’s off school she can start coming by whenever she wants.

It’s a beginning.

Rhodey finally manages a visit, since he’s been busy as the newly appointed Secretary of Defense. Tony gets the impression that he’s been working on something urgent, although of course Rhodey can neither confirm nor deny that. When Rhodey says he’ll call, though, Tony believes him.

And then there’s Peter, who has somehow slotted himself perfectly into Tony’s new life. It starts with Peter coming by to help him set up the new lab space, arranging tables and debating over which variations of equipment to buy. Then Peter realizes that Tony hasn’t yet bothered to furnish most of his living space, so Tony makes some calls and the next day he’s once again the proud owner of couches and tables.

Once he has an actual home and not just an empty top floor, Peter starts staying for dinner. The two of them eat takeout straight from the carton while they talk about the pop culture that Tony’s missed.

“It’s barely even worth watching,” Peter says of the latest Star Wars film. He’s perched cross-legged on Tony’s new sofa, eating dim sum with a pair of chopsticks.

“I’ve seen the Christmas special, kid,” Tony says. “Trust me when I say it’s only up from there.”

They watch the movie projected across Tony’s wall. They were both right: it’s not the worst Star Wars film Tony’s ever seen, but it’s no Return of the Jedi. Tony looks over to Peter as the credits start to roll, but he’s sound asleep on his side, using his arm as a makeshift pillow.

If anyone deserves this moment of peace, it’s Peter Parker, this brilliant, selfless young man who’s thrown himself into danger since he was just a kid. Tony sits quietly and watches him breathe for a moment before he catches himself, shaking his head and standing up. He’s not creepy enough to watch the kid sleep.

Tony finds extra blankets in his hall closet – the people he’d paid an exorbitant amount of money to furnish this place had covered all the bases – and pulls a pillow off his own bed.

Peter blinks open his eyes while Tony is pulling the blanket over him. “Tony?” he asks, sleep-slurred. “Time’s it?”

“Late,” Tony answers. “Sit up a little bit, I’ve got a pillow for you.” Peter pulls up his head and Tony slips the pillow under him. “Now go back to sleep, kid.”

“M’not a kid,” Peter mumbles, and the next breath he’s snoring.

Yeah, Tony knows.

While he’s falling asleep, he imagines pulling Peter into his bed with him instead of leaving him on the couch, of sleeping with Peter tucked so close next to him that he can feel the rise and fall of every breath.

Tony’s not sure where that desire came from. It should feel terribly wrong, the want to have his former protégé quite that close to him. The thoughts aren’t quite sexual, but they’re dangerously close, could be if Tony let them wander away from him. Peter’s barely out of his teenage years, after all, and Tony’s got more grey hairs than not, these days. The old Tony Stark had always tried to keep Peter at arm’s length, thought it was the best thing for them both. Maybe he was right.

But his thoughts of Peter are almost too gentle for guilt, so he lets himself fall asleep comforted by the knowledge that the kid’s asleep just in the other room, peaceful and comfortable and _safe_.

Tony wakes up to the sound of clanking dishes the next morning. When he makes his way into the living space, Peter is tending to a pan of scrambled eggs in the kitchen area, his brown hair sleep-rumpled.

“Thanks for letting me crash here, Tony,” Peter says, glancing over his shoulder while he flips the eggs. His sweatpants sit low on his hips, and Tony isn’t sure when he started noticing things like that. “I didn’t realize I was so tired.”

“Don’t make too much,” Tony says. “We’re going to an early lunch with Pepper and Morgan, wouldn’t want to have no appetite.” Well, _Tony_ had been going to an early lunch with Pepper and Morgan, but he isn’t ready to let go of Peter yet.

“Are you inviting me to lunch?” Peter asks. Tony hadn’t really thought it through before he said it, but yeah, that’s what he’s doing.

“I have it on good authority that Morgan thinks you’re really, really cool,” Tony explains, leaning against the kitchen counter. “Plus, Pepper’s bringing Ken the accountant this time, and there’s no way for that not to be a little weird. I’d appreciate the moral support. If you want to come.”

Peter takes a moment to get out plates for the eggs, moving through Tony’s space like he lives here. For a second Tony thinks he’s overstepped, asked a little too much, and now Peter is trying to figure out how to let him down, but then he answers.

“Yeah,” Peter says, looking to Tony with a smile. “I’d really like that.”

***

They meet at a cute little diner-type place, where the waitstaff seats them in a quiet corner and doesn’t bat an eyelash at the arrival of Tony Stark. Someone’s in for an excellent tip later.

Pepper, bless her, doesn’t react at all to Tony bringing a guest. He can’t say the same for her boyfriend, Ken the accountant, whose eyes dart between Tony and Peter like he’s figuring out an equation. Tony sees the implications of bringing a man three decades his junior is to an eleven a.m. family get-together, but it’s not like Ken knows that Peter slept over and had to wear one of Tony’s shirts.

(Okay, it’s an AC/DC tour shirt from the eighties. Everyone who looks at them probably knows whose shirt it is. But that doesn’t mean the rest of his assumptions are correct.)

Morgan really does love Peter, it turns out, and immediately starts asking rapid-fire questions about the bad guys he’s caught lately.

“Woah, cupcake,” Tony interrupts. “We should probably keep those questions for when there aren’t people around, huh?”

Everyone around the table pauses to look at him, confused, and then Peter winces. This is one of those things that Tony missed, the only one not in on the joke.

“Oh, um, people know I’m Spider-Man now, Mr. Stark,” he says. (Tony’s not sure what he did to get Mr. Starked, here, but he likes Tony so much better.) Pepper and Ken look pitying, which Tony hates, and Morgan just looks confused.

“Huh,” Tony says, faux nonchalance. He folds and unfolds a corner of his napkin. “Guess I missed that.” Peter’s grateful look tells him there was more to that story, that it wasn’t a _good_ story. He’s grateful that Tony isn’t insisting on hearing the rest of it, at least not in the middle of lunch.

The waitress cuts in then, excellent timing, and Tony files the thought away for later.

Morgan keeps Peter occupied with her Spider-Man questions, and Peter happily indulges her. She’s just as interested in how the web fluid works as she is in stories where Peter punches the bad guys, which Tony feels warmly proud about. She doesn’t understand the finer points of the biochemistry yet, but she’ll get there if she wants to. And Peter’s so good with her, answering every question she has and not acting like the science is above her, even when it is.

Even Ken is mostly acceptable. He’s soft-spoken, almost quiet, but he says it’s wonderful to see Tony again (yeah, apparently the guy used to do accounting for Stark Industries, so Tony pretends to know who he is) and he seems to mean it. His questions about what Tony’s working on these days are reasonably sharp, even. They’re never going to be best friends, but they’ll get along all right.

He hugs Morgan before it’s time to leave, and she thanks him for bringing Peter and asks when they can do this again.

“Whenever you want,” Tony promises.

***

Tony Googles Spider-Man on the ride home, which leads him to one horror after another, his stomach sinking with every detail. He ends up having to break into some classified files to get the whole picture, and every little piece he finds is worse than the last. Not only what happened to Peter since he’s been gone, but also that so much of it is Tony’s fault.

Quentin Beck had always been a smug asshole, but Tony never could have imagined – _this_. The target he’d painted on Peter’s back by leaving him EDITH, drawing Tony’s old enemies to him like a beacon.

Beck had tried to kill Peter, had outed him as Spider-Man when that didn’t work. Peter had only been _sixteen_ , and Tony put a target on him.

Tony hadn’t been there to protect him.

His first instinct is to run to Peter’s apartment, tell him how sorry he is, but he imagines someone bursting into his space with questions about Afghanistan or coming back from the dead. It might make Tony feel better, but for Peter it would just dredge up something dark and unwanted.

He’ll do better, now that he’s here. Maybe he can’t make it right, but he can be here for Peter this time. Whatever Peter has to go through next, he won’t be doing it alone.

***

Peter keeps coming by a couple times a week, which Tony isn’t sure how he manages between college, Spider-Man, and a social life. He doesn’t ask because he’s greedy, doesn’t want to encourage Peter to be somewhere else when he could be with Tony instead.

They finish the new set of Star Wars movies then start in on the Back to the Future reboot, which isn’t as awful as it sounds. Sometimes they work side by side in the lab, Peter offering commentary on Tony’s new projects or Tony helping Peter with his work. Often, though, Peter’s just there, doing his homework or making repairs on the suit. He used to go up to the compound most weekends for the lab, so he says he appreciates living so close to a good lab, and Tony appreciates the company.

Sometimes he hears Peter’s side of a phone call with May, listens to him assuring her that everything’s fine and he’ll be coming by for dinner next week. It’s comfortably domestic, which makes Tony’s chest ache. He likes it too much.

Tony visits for one of those dinners, invited by Happy. He and May really are as nauseating as Peter described, rubbing their noses together at one point during dinner and routinely finishing each other’s sentences. Peter mimes throwing up onto the floor, and Tony can’t help but laugh.

Peter keeps coming to lunches with Pepper and Morgan, which are now a Sunday routine. When he misses a week while studying for finals, Morgan pouts and Pepper tells Tony to make sure he knows they missed him.

Life settles into a rhythm, and it’s over a month before something changes.

Tony doesn’t get updates from Karen anymore, but FRIDAY still alerts him when Peter makes the news. That’s how he hears about the bank robbery – suspects now in custody, no injuries except for Spider-Man, who left the scene with multiple gunshot wounds. He’s suited up and out the door before he has time to second guess it.

He knows where Peter lives, although he’s never been there before. The old brownstone apartment building is less of a dump than he’d worried it would be, although the security is terrible. Tony follows another resident in through the front door, a college-aged girl who stares wide-eyed as Iron Man jogs past her up the stairs.

Peter answers his door still wearing his blood-stained suit, mask off. He’s battered, but he’s up and walking. He’s alive.

“It’s not as bad as it looks,” he says, one hand clutching his side. There are smears of blood on his face.

“Yeah, I can’t say I believe you,” Tony replies. Peter opens the door wider and Tony enters, retracting the nanobots so he’s back in his street clothes.

Peter’s apartment is a studio, his bed tucked into one corner. There’s a worn sofa in the other corner, the coffee table in front of it stacked with textbooks. There aren’t blinds or screens on the windows, and one of them is fully open. Tony wonders if Peter ever uses his door.

“Do you want some weed?” Peter asks him. _What_.

“What?” Tony asks, turning to face Peter.

“It helps with the pain,” Peter says, which makes Tony ache with sympathy. “Better than pills. I think I metabolize them too fast.”

Tony had been about to give him a hard time about golden boy Peter Parker using drugs, but that doesn’t feel right now. It’s not like he can judge, anyway. “Sure,” he says instead, even though he can’t remember the last time he’d partaken. Cocaine had been his party drug of choice back in the day, then alcohol when things weren’t so crazy.

“It’s in the freezer,” Peter says, gesturing in the direction of the kitchenette. “I’m gonna get changed.”

Tony finds the baggie behind a box of Eggos, along with a very cold pipe. He hears the bathroom door close, and then the shower comes on. Rinsing off the blood, he thinks, and then winces. Pharmaceuticals aren’t really Tony’s area of expertise, but he’s got contacts, so he decides to make some calls later. There’s no reason for Peter to be doing all of this without pain relief that works.

Peter emerges wearing soft-looking sweatpants and an oversized t-shirt, and Tony’s already reclined on the couch, lighting up.

“You doing okay, kid?” Tony asks, passing him the pipe as Peter settles down next to him. Tony’s off to one side of the couch, leaning against the arm. Peter could have put a whole cushion’s worth of space between them, but he doesn’t, sitting pressed up next to Tony instead.

“I’ve been worse,” he replies. “The bullets all went clean through.” Tony doesn’t want to think about what had been worse than that, all the times Peter must have been shot to be so casual about it now.

They sit for a while, passing the pipe back and forth until Tony’s mind goes blurry around the edges. He can’t remember weed being this strong.

“Was it,” Tony starts, but his voice is raspy. He clears his throat, toys with the pipe in his hand instead of looking up. “Was it hard, coming back? After you’d been gone.”

There’s a long pause. “Dying was a lot worse,” Peter answers eventually. Tony chances a look at him, but he’s looking away, too. “I think – I knew I wasn’t ready to go, you know?”

He remembers Peter dissolving in his hands, trying to hold onto him even as he turned to dust; he wasn’t ready for Peter to go, either. He’d been so young, so full of life, and Tony had failed him. But when it had been Tony’s turn to die, that had seemed right. He’d accepted it, at least.

“I got lucky, though,” Peter continues. “May, my friends, they got blipped, too. I can’t imagine coming back and being the only one.”

“Yeah,” Tony says.

Peter meets Tony’s eyes quickly, his eyes huge like he’d just made a mistake. “Not that – I’m sorry, I didn’t mean – “

“It’s fine,” Tony says gently, and means it. It wasn’t, not at first, but he no longer wakes up every morning and wonders who he is. “I’m not alone.” He has Pepper and Morgan, the three of them learning to be a different kind of family, now. And he has Peter.

Peter turns to him then, moving his whole body so he’s facing Tony on the couch. “I’m glad you’re here,” he says, his gaze sincere. “Strange told me I was crazy for doing the whole ritual thing, you know? But I needed to do it. I had to try.”

“Why was it crazy?” Tony asks, and when Peter glances away he starts connecting the dots in his head.

What had Strange said, that his books warned him about unsuccessful resurrection spells? Then there was Peter’s reluctance to talk about the details, the thought that Strange said he shouldn’t try to bring Tony back.

“It was dangerous,” Tony said as he realized. He should have seen this before. “It could have hurt you, trying to bring me back.”

Peter doesn’t deny it. “I’d do it again,” he says, meeting Tony’s eyes. He looks determined, stubborn, the young man who leaps off buildings day after day because he needs to do the right thing.

“Peter,” Tony says, frustrated. “You can’t – I can’t have you dying for me.”

“You died for me,” Peter answers, annoyed, almost petulant. His brow is scrunched together, the line of his mouth set. “I mean, for everyone, but you _died_.” He was right the first time. Tony did die for him, and he’d do it all over again without any regrets. He can see the hypocrisy of being mad at Peter for being just as stupidly self-sacrificing as he is, but he still hates it, hates that Peter is too much like Tony for his own good.

“I did die for you,” Tony says, a little too raw, more truthful than he should be. “I watched you die once, and I couldn’t – I can’t watch you do that again. I can’t lose you.”

 _You’re the best thing to happen to me since I woke up_ , he doesn’t say.

Peter looks softer now, like Tony’s confession melted him just a little, and his gaze is searching Tony’s face. Tony can’t keep himself from looking back at Peter the same way, from taking in his big brown eyes and his pretty pink lips. It’s hard to deny that Peter is gorgeous when they’re so close together, when Tony could count the freckles on his face.

He’s not sure which of them moved, but they’re closer now, just breaths apart. Peter’s hand comes up to touch Tony’s cheek, the movement gentle.

“I can’t lose you, either, Tony,” Peter says. Then, “Tell me if I’m reading this wrong.” It sounds like a plea.

Peter brings their lips together, gentle, just a testing touch. His lips are soft, plush, but they don’t linger. Tony’s too slow to react, his mind still weed-hazy, and as quickly as it started Peter is withdrawing.

Then he pulls Peter back in, firm hands on his hips. The second kiss is messier, needier. Peter scrapes his teeth against Tony’s bottom lip insistently and Tony lets him in, lets him deepen the kiss. They fit together this way the same as they have in everything since Tony came back: almost effortlessly, familiar in a way it has no real right to be. Kissing Peter feels right in a way that almost nothing else has in a long time.

Peter swings a leg over Tony’s hips and settles into his lap, wrapping his arms around the older man’s shoulders. Tony’s hands naturally fall to the backs of his thighs, just shy of the curve of Peter’s ass. The younger man lets out a little high-pitched whimper when Tony touches him, and Tony thinks he could get addicted to that sound.

They’re close now, torso to torso, lips seeking each other out until they fall back into heated kissing. When Peter moves his hips Tony feels his erection, warm and insistent against Tony’s abdomen. Tony’s straining in his own pants, too, and he just – he needs a minute.

Tony pulls back. Peter chases him at first, then stops, looking alarmingly like a kicked puppy.

“If we keep going I won’t be able to stop,” Tony explains, desperate to get keep that look off Peter’s face. “It’s not – you didn’t do anything wrong. I wanted that, too.”

Peter seems pleased with that answer – maybe too pleased, since he takes it as a cue to roll his hips again. Tony hisses out a breath through his teeth.

“What if I don’t want to stop?” Peter asks, his lips close enough to brush Tony’s as he speaks.

“We’re high,” Tony says, pushing in for a quick kiss because he’s a weak, weak man. “I don’t want our first time to be while we’re high.”

Peter’s the one who pulls back a little then, looking Tony in the eye. “First time?” he asks, because the kid’s too damn quick on the uptake, and Tony realizes he’s been taking a few things for granted, here. All the more reason to slow down a little.

“I’ll take whatever you want to give me, kid,” Tony says, sticking with the too-honest theme of the night. “I can’t say I’ve never done the one-time thing before, if that’s what you want. I mean, Jesus, Pete. I’m thirty years older than you, and I’m not even sure if my divorce has gone through yet.”

“I don’t care,” Peter says, insistent. “Tony, you have to know I don’t care.”

“Maybe you should care,” Tony says. “I should probably care, too, honestly. But as it is, I’m here for as long as you want me to be, Pete.”

Peter pulls him close for a hug, then, resting his face against Tony’s neck.

“Will you stay tonight?” Peter asks, sounding vulnerable. “I don’t mean – we don’t have to do stuff, I just. I’ll sleep better if I know you’re here.”

Tony runs a hand through his hair, says “Of course, sweetheart,” and doesn’t let him go.

***

Tony wakes in the morning with too much sunlight streaming over his face and Peter’s breath tickling the back of his neck. He vaguely remembers falling into Peter’s bed, the two of them curling up together and passing out almost immediately. He doesn’t bother checking the time, just lets himself drift back off.

He wakes a second time to the sound of an alarm, Peter swearing profusely as something clatters to the floor. Tony rolls over, watches Peter pull his phone up off the floor and shut the alarm off.

“I have half an hour,” Peter says, looking at Tony. He’s still got sleep lines on his face and his hair is sticking up in ways that defy physics. “And I’m not high anymore, by the way.”

Tony laughs. “This is what I get for shacking up with a teenager, huh?” he says, even as he pulls a very willing Peter up to straddle his lap. He’d been quite enjoying this position last night.

“I’m _twenty_ , Mr. Stark,” Peter says, and Tony’s cock twitches a little. All this effort to get Peter calling him Tony most of the time, and it seems that sometimes _Mr. Stark_ is acceptable after all. From the way Peter’s smirking, he didn’t miss it, either. “See? You can keep up with me.”

Then they’re kissing again, Peter leaning down to meet Tony’s mouth, and this time Peter doesn’t stop the constant roll of his hips. Tony gets fully hard quickly, could probably shoot off in his pants like he’s fifteen if they keep this up.

“Let me see you,” Tony says, tugging at the waistband of the sweatpants Peter had fallen asleep in. Peter’s compliant, lifts his hips to pull them and his boxers down, working them off his legs without getting off Tony’s lap in a pretty stunning display of flexibility.

His cock is lovely, pink and uncut and curling slightly upward. Peter’s dripping precome already, and he bucks his hips when Tony reaches out to swipe a thumb through it. He wonders exactly how sensitive Peter is, if he could treat it like a scientific endeavor to find out.

Tony wraps his hand around Peter’s cock, more whimpery noises falling from Peter’s open mouth.

“You too,” Peter says breathily, leaning his forehead against Tony’s. “I don’t – I’m not gonna last long, let me see you too.”

There’s a bit of fumbling to get Tony’s pants off because he’s not the acrobatic boy wonder in this scenario, but he manages. Peter had to move in the process, so Tony takes the opportunity to reverse their positions, putting Peter on his back and straddling his hips. The way Peter’s eyes darken, it seems that he approves.

When Tony grinds his hips down, aligning their cocks, they both moan. “Fuck, that feels good,” Tony grunts out, repeating the motion. He leans down to box Peter in between his forearms, connecting their lips. Tony leaves his eyes open, too enraptured by Peter’s blissed out face to look away.

“You’re so beautiful,” Tony says on another rotation of his hips, one hand tugging at Peter’s curls. And, _oh_ , Peter likes that, his cock twitching and his pretty pink mouth going slack.

“Tony,” he chokes out, and Tony tugs again, a little harder.

“There you go, sweetheart,” he says as Peter twitches his hips up helplessly, starts to coat their torsos in come. It’s the hottest thing Tony can ever remember seeing, watching Peter let go like that.

Tony works him through it, slowing the roll of his hips and kissing him gently. It takes a moment for Peter to open his eyes again, half-lidded and a little dazed. Then he reaches down to wrap his hand around Tony’s cock, giving it a tug that’s slicked with sweat and his own come.

“You don’t need to,” Tony says, because he wants to make sure Peter knows he isn’t expecting anything.

“Tony,” Peter says seriously, “I’ve been fantasizing about this since I figured out what my cock did.”

And, well. That blows Tony’s mind a little. He’s going to have to mentally review everything that Peter’s ever done around him, but that will come later.

“Not that that’s all this is,” Peter says, quickly. “I mean, I’ve always had a crush on you, but – I know you now, you know? It’s not just ‘cause you’re, like, Tony Stark or whatever, I don’t – “

Tony cuts him off with a kiss then, nipping at his lower lip and thrusting into the hot, wet space that Peter’s hand has made for him. It’s embarrassingly quick before Tony’s coming, too, pulsing into Peter’s hand and adding to the mess on them both.

Tony rolls off Peter and onto his back, and there are only a few breaths of silence before Peter’s looking at his phone.

“Shit,” he exclaims, hopping up from the bed. “I’m gonna be late.” Then Peter’s bounding off into the bathroom, probably to wash himself off.

It’s been a long time since Tony’s done that with another man. It’s a little terrifying, less because Peter’s a man and more because he’s _Peter_ , brilliant and gorgeous and brave, who can make even messy morning handjobs into good sex.

Tony’s already a little bit in love with him.

“Can I come by after class?” Peter asks as he walks out of the bathroom, wiping himself with a towel. “I still need to finish the project I was working on the other night, the one with the plastic-eating bacteria? I need some of the lab equipment.”

“You can come by whenever you want,” Tony answers. Right now, Peter could ask for pretty much anything within Tony’s power and he would get it – and that was a lot.

Peter grins, coming up to the bed and pecking Tony on the mouth before he goes off again, tugging on his clothes quickly. The kid has no idea how much power he has over Tony, none at all.

Maybe Tony will be scared about this later, but right now, as Peter heads for the door with a run-on “I’ll see you later please lock the door okay bye,” only to come back and give Tony one more kiss before he leaves, it all feels really good.

***

The next time he brings Peter to lunch, Pepper knows immediately. Tony’s got no idea how, since he doesn’t think either of them look any different, but she looks between them and smiles Maybe Tony has some kind of “I just got laid” tell, or maybe he’s just letting himself look at Peter the way he’s felt about him for a while now.

He doesn’t know what reaction he expected from her, hasn’t had time to think about that yet. Probably that _really, Tony_ look of mild disdain that she’s perfected over the years. Tony could come up with a very long list of reasons why this is a bad idea, himself. He’s not going to, because none of it would convince him to stay away from Peter anyway, but he _could_.

But that’s not how she reacts.

“I’m happy for you,” she says quietly into his ear as they walk toward their usual table. Tony raises his eyebrows in surprise as he turns to look at her, but she’s already sitting down and smoothing a napkin over her lap. She starts chatting with Ken, holding up the big, plastic menu to gesture at a picture of pancakes.

Morgan’s on her other side, next to Peter. He’s telling her a kid-friendly version of the bank robbery, complete with ridiculous, deep-voiced impersonations of the robbers, while she watches with rapt attention. Tony’s a little worried that she’s going to grow up with a rose-colored view of vigilantism, but that might have been inevitable.

Then she looks up at Tony, who’s still standing next to the table and smiling at them like an idiot.

“Sit down, dad,” she insists. “Peter’s telling us how he got the bad guys.” Peter looks up at Tony too, grinning. Tony takes his seat next to Peter, who starts miming out how he’d gotten into the bank through a skylight.

Tony’s exactly where he wants to be. It’s going to be okay.


End file.
